The Black Reckoning Page 10

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’ll die. The last part of me that’s still me, the part you helped keep alive, he’ll kill it. It’ll become part of him.” Rafe dropped his gaze. “But the thing is, at first, you won’t even know. If he doesn’t have the Books yet, he’ll keep appearing to you as me, making you do what he wants.” Rafe gave a short, empty laugh. “Maybe he already has. Maybe he’s doing it right now.”

  “No,” Kate said fiercely, her doubts of a moment before forgotten. “I would know.”

  “Would you? He’s me, remember? Could you really tell us apart?”

  “Yes. I would always know you.”

  And she reached out her hand, but it passed through his as if he were made of smoke. She had wanted to try it ever since she’d seen him the night before.

  “Sorry,” Rafe said.

  She looked away, feeling stupid. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Kate…”

  She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  She turned toward him, her eyes glistening.

  “You asked why I’m helping you, but you know, don’t you? You have to know.”

  He seemed so urgent, so desperate that she should understand. Kate nodded; and this time she didn’t wipe away her tears.

  “Yes. Yes, I know.”

  She saw the relief in his face, and she was about to speak—to tell him that he was wrong, that it wasn’t just a part of him she loved—but he looked away sharply, staring up the hill.

  “You need to go. Your brother and sister are in danger.”

  She didn’t say goodbye. She just turned and ran. As she sprinted uphill, she could hear Michael and Emma screaming. Then, abruptly, they were silent. A few moments later, she came out of the mist to the place where they had spent the night. It was deserted, Michael’s emergency rations still in neat piles on the rock.

  “Michael! Emma!”

  “Kate!”

  It was Emma’s voice. She was close by, but farther along the hill. Kate set off running; the hill curved and, after fifty or so yards, stopped, turning into a cliff that dropped thirty feet. Kate found herself staring out over the rough, hilly landscape. Her brother and sister were nowhere to be seen.

  “Michael! Emma—”

  “GOTCHA!”

  The voice was a deep, mountainous rumble, and Kate was seized before she could react. It took her a second to realize that what had grabbed her was a hand as large as her entire body. She was lifted up into the air, and she found herself looking at…a face? There were two eyes, a gigantic nose, a low, lumpy forehead, and a mouth full of snaggly teeth. The creature’s boulder-like head was attached to an enormous neck, which was attached to enormous shoulders and an enormous body.

  “Kate!”

  Kate saw her brother and sister in the giant’s other fist. Then the giant spoke, blasting her with a wave of warm, wet, sour breath.

  “MORE TINY PEOPLE!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Willy

  Racing up the hill, Emma had been some yards behind Gabriel and gotten a clear view of the giant leaping out from behind the cliff and snatching up Gabriel with a gleeful laugh. Even in the moment, as part of her brain had shouted Giant! That’s a giant! I need a camera! another part had been amazed that something that large could hide that well; but the giant looked so much like the earth itself, all rough and craggy and dirty and mucky, that it was little wonder he’d blended in perfectly with the landscape. Gabriel had managed to pull his sword, and as he was lifted into the air, he’d jabbed it into the giant’s hand, causing the monster to give a strangely high-pitched shriek. The giant had yanked out the sword and thrown it spinning away into the distance; then, with his thumb and forefinger, he’d flicked Gabriel in the side of the head and dropped his limp body into a leather pouch at his side.

  All this had taken no more than a few seconds, and by the time Emma had overcome her shock, she herself had been snatched up. Michael had appeared a minute later, having heard Emma’s scream, and he’d been seized as well, and, with a child in each hand, the giant had brought them up close to his face so that they were only feet from his great, mossy, snaggletoothed grin. Then he’d begun literally jumping up and down with glee, making the whole hillside tremble.

  “TINY PEOPLE! TINY PEOPLE!”

  “Let go of us!” Emma had shouted. “Put us down!”

  But the giant had sniffed the air and pressed himself back against the cliff face, while also transferring Michael to the same hand as Emma and crushing them both in his moist, filthy, eggy-smelling fist. Emma was wondering what he was doing when she heard Kate calling her name and tried to claw her way up out of the giant’s fist to warn her sister, but it had been too late.

  And then they were all caught.

  Clearly feeling that he’d done a good morning’s work, the giant walked along humming gaily, carrying Emma and Michael in one hand and Kate in the other. Emma had managed to worm her head out of the giant’s fist, but Michael was stuck down deep in the pit of the massive palm, and she could see him slowly turning green as he breathed in the rank, funky air.

  As the giant lumbered along, swinging them forward and back, forward and back, in long sweeping arcs, Emma and Kate tried calling to each other in the moment or two the other was visible during passes over the enormous bulge of the giant’s belly.

  “Are you okay?!” Kate yelled.

  “We’re okay!” She looked down at Michael. “Are you okay?”

  Michael nodded, though he looked more and more like he might be sick.

  “We’re okay!” Emma shouted, and then shouted it again. The first time she had mistimed it and shouted as Kate was disappearing behind the giant’s back. Kate asked about Gabriel, and—again it took a few tries to get the message across—Emma told her that he’d been knocked unconscious and stuck in the giant’s pouch.

  Kate and Emma both screamed at the giant to put them down, pounding their fists ineffectually against his hands. Emma even bit the skin of the giant’s thumb to try and get his attention, which was far and away the grossest thing she’d ever done, and it turned out to be pointless anyway because the giant didn’t seem to notice but went trundling along, singing a made-up-sounding song, the few words of which Emma picked out were pie and yum-yum.

  Emma knew that the Atlas was their best chance of escape, but for that to work, they would have to be touching each other and not touching the giant. For now, all they could do was wait.

  And hope Michael didn’t suffocate.

  They were moving quickly, as you do when the legs of the person carrying you are fifteen feet long. The giant’s booming footfalls left deep craters in the earth, and Emma realized that it was one of his footprints she’d fallen into, and what had first caught Gabriel’s attention.

  The giant kept mostly to the valleys and had no compunction about wading through the center of a lake so that Emma and Michael (and Kate in the opposite hand) were repeatedly dunked as his hands swung in and out of the icy water. Emma wondered that the cold water didn’t wake Gabriel, but there was no movement in the leather pouch, and she began to worry that her friend was more gravely wounded than she’d thought.

  By now, Emma had been able to really look at the giant. Obviously, the most immediately impressive fact was that he was forty feet tall. But he wasn’t just tall, he was also wide. And thick. So much so, his proportions seemed off. His face too wide, his eyes too big, his hands and fingers too cumbersome and massive. If anything, Emma reflected, he should’ve been taller and more stretched out.

  He had shaggy brown hair that looked as if it had been cut with some sort of tree-trimming tool, his eyebrows—or rather eyebrow, as it was one continuous line—was a dense brown shrub that curved around the corners of his eyes. His features were heavy to the point of being grotesque, but there was also a certain goofiness to him, which would’ve been more pronounced, Emma reflected, if he hadn’t
been planning to eat them. That he was going to eat them, Emma had no doubt. She’d also made the mistake—only once—of looking up while directly below the giant so that she’d seen into his nostrils, where something (she wasn’t sure what, that it was brown and furry was all she could be sure of) was moving about.

  His clothes all looked decidedly homemade—which made sense, as where would a giant go to buy clothes?—and his pants, shirt, and vest were stitched together from various sources (all of them in the tan-to-dark-brown spectrum), giving him a hodgepodge, village-idiot sort of look.

  They went on like this for perhaps twenty minutes, the giant humming and singing all the while. Kate would periodically call over to make sure they were okay, and Emma would say they were, or that Michael had thrown up again, but yes, otherwise, they were okay. When she could, Emma would glance toward the leather pouch for some sign of Gabriel stirring (still none), and several times, she caught sight of other figures in the distance, massive heads and shoulders bobbing along the tops of hills. Once, the giant crouched down behind a large rock outcropping, again effortlessly becoming part of the landscape, to let another giant, a great, fat, shambling mountain of arms and legs and stomach, pass by, the earth shaking as he went.

  “It was another giant,” Emma told Michael, who couldn’t see anything from inside their giant’s fist. His face was now a green, sluggy color. “Our giant’s hiding.”

  “He probably doesn’t want to share his dinner,” Michael said flatly.

  Emma reflected that this was probably true.

  “Did you know giants were real?” she asked.

  Nauseated as he was, this was the kind of question that Michael loved, and he rallied himself to answer. “I never…considered the existence of giants as such, but it stands to reason that if dwarves and dragons and—”

  “Never mind,” Emma said, already regretting she’d asked.

  Once the fat giant (or really, the fatter giant) had moved off, the children’s captor rose and continued on. He seemed to be heading toward a line of higher hills in the distance, and, again thanks to the length of his stride, it was not long before they were being carried down a steep-sided valley with the hills rising up directly before them.

  “Look!”

  It was Kate, shouting to them from the giant’s other fist and pointing. Farther along the valley stood an enormous, ramshackle wooden house. It looked exactly like the sort of house that someone forty feet tall and not overly concerned with cleanliness and appearance might choose to live in. It was probably twice the size of the mansion in Cambridge Falls, but while the mansion had been imposing and grand, this house, for all its size, was more shacklike and thrown together. Parts of the roof appeared to have caved in, walls were buttressed with tree trunks, filthy canvas flaps covered the glassless windows, and the whole thing was listing dangerously to one side. A crooked, gray-stone chimney rose from the roof, dark smoke climbing into the sky.

  The giant stopped, turned, and crouched down so that his back blocked them from view of the house. He placed his fists on top of a large boulder and brought his face down close to the children. When he spoke, it was obvious he was trying to keep his voice low, but the effect was still deafening.

  “Now listen, tiny little people, when we get inside, not a peep!”

  “My brother can’t hear you!” Emma shouted. “And he’s suffocating inside your stupid, smelly hand!”

  The giant frowned as if he hadn’t heard, then turned his head so that one ear faced Emma, causing Emma to exclaim:

  “Oh! That is so, so gross!”

  For the giant’s ear was clogged with clumpy mounds of blackened dirt and wax, some of which hung from the ceiling of his ear canal like rotted-yellow stalactites, and there was a wall of wax at the back of his ear so thick-looking that Emma wondered how he heard anything at all. Still, she was about to shout again when she and Michael were lifted in the air. They were both then upside down and screaming as he stuck out a massive pinky finger—causing Michael’s legs to kick furiously in the air—and screwed his pinky back and forth in his ear, making loud squeak-squeak noises and no doubt packing the wax in tighter, as if he were loading a huge, fleshy blunderbuss.

  Then he placed his fist, and the extremely dizzy Michael and Emma, back on the rock, turned his ear toward them, and said:

  “Whazzat? Didn’t hear ya!”

  Emma cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “My brother can’t breathe!”

  “Oh.” The giant opened his fist so that Michael and Emma both tumbled out onto the boulder. Michael immediately fell to his knees, gasping. Emma glanced over at Kate, but she was still held tight in the giant’s other fist.

  “Like I was saying, no talking when we get inside or it’s right straight into the pie.”

  “Put my sister down too!” Emma demanded. “And let Gabriel go!”

  “Huh?”

  “You are so annoying! I said—” She cupped her hands around her mouth and was about to yell when there was a noise from the house, a clatter like a dropped pan, followed by the sound of someone cursing.

  “Oh no,” the giant said, and he snatched up Michael, who still looked extremely woozy, dropped him into one of his vest pockets, and then, before Emma could protest, snatched her up as well and placed her in another pocket. She landed facedown in a pile of dirt and twigs and small rocks, bits of hard cheese, and what felt very much like bones.

  She was just getting to her knees when something landed hard on her back.

  “Oww!”

  “Sorry!”

  It was Kate. The sisters embraced in the dank darkness of the giant’s pocket, and Kate asked if she was hurt.

  “I’m fine.”

  “And Michael?”

  “Just sick.”

  “Did you say Gabriel’s in the giant’s pouch?”

  “Uh-huh. That smelly creep knocked him out and stuck him in there. I’m worried. I don’t think he’s moved.”

  Kate reached out and gave her hand a comforting squeeze. “As soon as we’re all together, I’ll use the Atlas. Are you really okay?”

  There was light coming in from the top of the pocket and more through a small rip near their heads, but it was still dim, and they were both trying to keep their balance, as the giant had risen and begun lumbering, presumably, toward the house.

  But Emma could see Kate studying her closely.

  “I’m fine. Really.” And to change the subject, she said, “There’re bones in here.”

  “I think they’re sheep. At least, I hope.”

  “Yeah.”

  Through the rip in the pocket, they could see the house getting closer. As they neared the front door, the giant (sort of) whispered, “Remember—quiet!” then pushed on the door, and they entered a large, smoky, poorly lit room. There was a heavy, slightly sour odor made up of bubbling fat and fermenting beer and body odor. Despite there being no glass in the windows, the room smelled like it had not been aired out in years. Emma and Kate caught glimpses of an enormous wooden table and chairs, collections of jars and cups, various roots and leaves and dried meats hanging from the ceiling, a goodly amount of trash, and, against one wall and throwing an orange-red glow across the room, a large gray-stone fireplace at which a woman (a giant woman, obviously) with long, dirty blond hair and a dress of washed-out gray was leaning over an iron pot, stirring a concoction with a wooden spoon that looked to have been carved from the trunk of an entire tree. The sleeves of her dress had been pushed up, revealing massive, muscled forearms.

  “Finally!” She hawked a large, brown glob of spit into the pot. “You been gone all mornin’! What’d you bring, then?”

  “Nothin’, Sall. Sorry.”

  “Nothin’?!” The blond giantess turned toward them, and Kate and Emma instinctively pulled back deeper into the giant’s pocket. But the woman’s attention was on the giant’s face. As she spoke, she waved about her spoon, sending globby droplets of stew this way and that. “You been out all mornin�
� wanderin’ around like a simpleton, probably starin’ at clouds and rocks, and you come back and tell me you got nothin’ for the stew?! Oh, but you’re still expectin’ to be fed, ain’t ya? Old Sall, she can just make a stew outta nothin’, can’t she? Well, it’s a big pot of nothin’ you’ll be eatin’ for supper, you half-wit!”

  “Said I’m sorry, Sall.”

  “Sorry?!” She laughed sourly. “Don’t you go apologizin’ to me! It’s gonna be Big Rog’s Thumb you’ll have to be apologizin’ to, sayin’ you’re sorry as he’s gouging out your eye!”

  “Ah now, Sall. Don’t be tellin’ the Thumb, right?”

  “ ‘Don’t be tellin’ the Thumb,’ is it? I will be tellin’ the Thumb!” The giantess had come over so that she was right in the other giant’s face, and she poked him as she spoke, her finger like a battering ram and coming awfully near Kate and Emma. “I’ll be tellin’ the Thumb the minute he walks in the door, and then it’ll be half-wit-eyeball soup we’ll be havin’! Oh indeed! Num, num, num!” And she made loud slurping sounds and rubbed a massive hand over her massive belly.

  “I’m goin’ to me room,” the giant muttered, and he started to turn, but the giantess caught his arm.

  “You wouldn’t be holdin’ out on me now, would you, Willy? Not holdin’ out on your own only sister? ’Cause not findin’ nothing, maybe—maybe—we could forgive that, you bein’ the half-wit moron dunderhead boogers-for-brains you are. But holdin’ out on us? Well, that’s malicious and unforgivable, ain’t it? And then the Thumb’ll be down on you for sure!”

  “I ain’t holdin’ out nothin’!” And he yanked his arm away.

  Emma looked at Kate and mouthed, “He doesn’t want to share. He wants to eat us all by himself.” And she made her eyes wide to put three exclamation points after it.

  Just then there was a yelp from the giant’s other pocket. The giant froze. The blond giantess froze. Emma and Kate froze. They knew their brother’s voice.

  The blond giantess let out a cry and sprang forward. The children’s giant tried to run, but he was too slow. Kate and Emma screamed, but their screams were drowned out by the sounds of the giants grappling, banging into the walls, the table, knocking pitchers and pots on the floor; it was obvious that the blond giantess was trying to dig into the giant’s pocket and the giant was trying to protect it, and Emma was sure that they were going to be crushed—